yoda-sama said:

I think you mean he changed it in the 80's for VHS, Television and--if I'm not mistaken--theatrical rereleases. The title was not a new change for the '97 SE's.

Yes, the "A New Hope" crawl was added in '81, but the packaging for the films (i.e. Laserdisc and VHS boxes) and other materials still called the film Star Wars pretty consistently until the Special Editions. A New Hope wasn't used because, at the time, nobody would have known what movie they were talking about--very few people called it that.

I think the statement was that even after the crawl was added, Lucasfilm didn't see any point in wholesale renaming one of the world's most popular movies (i.e. in packaging and related items) until the nineties.

EDIT: Actually I think there was a transitional period where there were big and little titles on the boxes. i.e. Empire would say in tiny text "Star Wars" and then in big text "The Empire Strikes Back", and Jedi would follow the same pattern, but Star Wars was inverted and said "Star Wars" in big text and "A New Hope" in tiny text, again, kinda admitting that the big text represented the name people knew the movie by.